Summer

Yesterday we had an arborist come to give an estimate for removing the dead ash tree from the front of our property:

 While I do love its Gothic-horror look, it's going to come down sooner or later, and I'd rather it not do so on me or a passing car. I took the opportunity to ask him some questions about some of the other trees, and learned that what we'd thought of as a very large bush, at the right in the photo, is actually CT's state tree, the mountain laurel. Its less-than-stellar appearance right now is apparently due to last year's drought, since that can take a year to show its effects. And it just occurred to me now that we have a mountain laurel...on Laurel Hill Road! :-)

Spring already seems to be over, and summer is here! At the pond, we've welcomed back the turtles (natives + adopted), the frogs (which are insanely loud at night), the herons, and discovered that the goldfish the previous owner chucked in on a whim are still in there, in the deeper water. Yesterday I pulled the rowboat (christened the S.S. Fat Man, in honor of JTD's unfulfilled desire for a boat) out of the shed and took it back down to the pond to fulfill the picturesque image that we saw when we first looked at the house. I don't know when we'll actually try going in the pond in it, though; when spring arrived, so did the Canada geese, and the pond is now home to at least one breeding pair and the four goslings they brought out for the first time yesterday. Geese: we don't like them. They poop, a lot (and if I thought two was bad, six is sooooo much worse), and they're really unpleasant sounding. Honestly I would hate them less, despite the poop, if they didn't have such a terrible honk! We get to hear it on take-off, landing, and when they're feuding with other geese (ie, frequently). Sigh. Damned wildlife. 

Said wildlife have put the kibosh on our plans to have a raised bed garden here like we did at Concord Street, at least this year. Sean's been too exhausted by the end of the school year to think about it, and we would have to do a lot of strategizing, and building, to create a garden fortress that can withstand the "locals." Sean thought maybe we could just use simple netting, but we've got everything from groundhogs to deer to rabbits - we'd need Fort Knox. We think the previous owner was planning a garden, because he arranged a bunch of cinderblocks into a U-shape in the backyard, so my plan is to use the cinder blocks as the base for posts and create an enclosure around the entire thing, then we can build at least two raised beds, maybe even three, inside it! 

But that's not a "first season of homeownership" type of plan. Mostly I'm just trying to keep up - keeping the garden beds with their frankly spectacular plantings weeded and watered, setting up the dozen or so peony plants with cages and struts to keep them from slumping over, mastering the beast that is our John Deere...the list goes on. Admittedly, working from home 3 days per week has meant that I've had a lot of flexibility to get things done! We've had the expected string of contractors, too. We just had an electrical outlet added to the back patio to run the Traeger smoker Linda gave us for Christmas, and Damon, the electrician, quoted about $3k if we ever wanted to run electrical down to the pond to power the (still-missing) pump and fountain. We had additional insulation added to the attic and above the garage, free courtesy of a program subsidized by Eversource. We're having the gutters replaced in a couple of weeks. One of Linda's friends, a landscaper, is going to look at our small grading project on the side of the house. We've been extremely fortunate in only have a few hiccups so far in home ownership, but the projects certainly do present themselves! So yeah, no Fort Knox of tomatoes this year, just a few pots on the patio: basil, mint, parsley, and oregano. 

Also, I bought a hammock and I fucking love it. 

The world feels so much more hopeful as we move into summer, thanks to the vaccines. Obviously it's not over yet, and more terrible shit happens in our country, and around the world, literally every day...but to be able to have Jen and Vinny over with the boys, no masks, and to not be a little bit nervous to pick up baby Leo and give him a hug? It's incredible. I'm headed up to their house tomorrow to babysit, while Sean attends ND's graduation in full "wizard robes." And then Sunday will mark twelve years since we got married! Damn! Time flies when you're...becoming an adult?

Of Old Neighbors and Ponds

 One thing I definitely didn't imagine myself doing, when we decided to buy a home? Mucking out a pond overflow grate! It gets clogged by these floating weeds, which I have remove either with a small rake, or (when it's quite stuck in there) by hand wearing rubber gloves. 

On the plus side, the times it's been really blocked, the rushing sound of the water as it pours into the concrete pipe is really nice.

I'm still not entirely clear on where the pipe goes. It aims toward the street, and my neighbor on the other side of the street, Joe, has a little creek on the down-slope of his property, so in my mind it seemed clear that our pond was feeding that? Joe, however, said that they're not directly connected, and when I asked where my pipe went, he waved toward the road and said "the catch basin," which I later realized is not a word that I understand. It's possible he meant the storm drain, but I really have no idea!

Joe's the reason I realized the drain had to be cleared at all; he mentioned it to me in passing in the autumn, and I vaguely scooped some leaves out at one point without thinking I'd need to do much else. Then when we got those repeated heavy rainstorms in November, the pond started to overflow the rocks at the edge because the weeds had jammed up the grate so badly. The first time I cleared it by hand was during a break in one of those downpours, and it roared when I got it open.

Joe confirmed for us that the pond is, indeed, man-made by our house's original owner, who Joe said just "got bored, started digging." Because there's so much underground water here, the pond stays pretty full on its own. I do wonder if I went to town hall if I could find any information on it -- who laid the concrete overflow pipe, for example, and where does it go??

The funny thing is that even a man-made pond still falls under the Inland Wetlands Commission and is protected by the town. We wouldn't be allowed to just strafe it with chemicals if we wanted to kill the pond weeds, for example. And Branford takes that shit seriously. We learned (also from Joe! Old man neighbors know all the shit) that the people in the house behind us, who we refer to as Todd and Margo, disliked Tony and Angela who we bought the house from -- in part, supposedly, because they had tried to buy the house themselves. Joe told me that Tony spent a lot of time removing poison ivy from the edge of the pond, but wound up removing some cattails in the process....and Todd and Margot reported him to the commission for it! He had to go appear before them to justify what he'd done. That's like, next-level drama. Their property line, interestingly enough, slices off just a small part of the far end of the pond from the road, so I suppose they do have an investment of sorts. We haven't met Todd and Margo in person. We're happy to judge them from afar. 

Joe's other piece of interesting pond info was that there's apparently a fountain in the center of ours! He told me to keep an eye out for a black tube, somewhere on the side (buried in the cattails, probably). He said we'd need to run electrical (which later had me scratching my head, because does that imply that there already was a buried electrical line somewhere between house + pond? Seems like the kind of shit you'd want to know...) and get a pump. I kind of want to make this happen this summer. And you'd better believe I'm going out in the rowboat. That's what caused the dead patch at left in the photo, it's where the boat was overturned. Another unexpected homeowner task, in the fall, was cleaning a rowboat so we could haul it into the shed for the winter. Never really thought I'd have to worry about that.

Pond weed aside, there's barely a day that goes by that one of us doesn't look around and say "I fucking love this house." I can't believe we've only been here three months!

The New Nest

Wildlife we encountered in the Cove:

• Squirrels 

Wildlife we've encountered in our new house:

• Turkeys (a flock of 15 or so who usually visit twice a day) 
• Coyotes (at least three; generally very quiet, and it was only thanks to a few very warm nights in October with the windows open that I could hear them padding around in the leaves)
• Bobcat (sighted on his way past the pond)
• Groundhog (living under the shed)
• Turtles and frogs (in the pond)
• Ducks (one pair, though the male seems to be on his own lately)
• Red fox (spotted trotting in general direction of turkeys on Thanksgiving morning)
• Skunk (observed rustling around in yard just last night)
• White-tailed deer (spotted nibbling in neighbor's yard this morning)
• Squirrels (ironically fewer than in the Cove, though that didn't stop the little bastards from massacring one of my pumpkins)

What's wild is that it's not like we moved into the country like Sara and Zach! We just moved eight miles away to another shoreline town. But it feels like a world of difference. Part of that is because our neighborhood backs up onto part of the Branford Land Trust that includes the Saltonstall Mountain. Even though "mountain" is a relative term, as a coastal dweller it was surprising to be hiking up quite so far, and to be able to look down across Route 80 into North Branford from the peak.

So, we freaking love this place. Although it was definitely sad not to have DiMarzo Thanksgiving at my aunt's (though we did have a family-wide Zoom and learned my cousin Sara, who is moving to the Branford/East Haven line, is pregnant!), the silver lining was that we got to celebrate our first holiday in our own home, but without the pressure of being the hosts. Sean decided to take advantage of the situation to make a duck, instead of a turkey, and it was so, so good: 

Although those look like grill marks, that was just the effect from scoring the skin, both to allow the fat to render and to rub in the paprika-based mix on the surface. Additionally, the meal featured both Linda's chestnut stuffing and DiMarzo-favored Pepperidge Farm, Sean's homemade cranberry sauce, and the brussel sprouts dish. Chopped brussel sprouts, sauteed in bacon fat, and mixed with a honey-balsamic sauce (which went with the honey-balsamic glaze later applied to the duck). My husband is an artist:

And because there wasn't any pressure on us, when the meal was ready and it was suddenly 65 degrees and sunny outside after a morning of rain, we went for a walk before we came back and ate! It was awesome. Later in the evening, we poached pears in red wine and ate them with ice cream (inspired by a common Academy dessert, but it should have been gelato). 

As Sean says, now we know we can do it, logistically, even without the second oven and fridge which are on his long-term wish list. Next Thanksgiving, God willing, we'll be back at my aunt's - with a new baby cousin! - but Christmas 2021? Hosting! And for Christmas 2020, the centerpiece will be rabbit, probably with polenta if we're doing it North Italian style. It turns out that if you want these things you have to get on the list in advance, as we discovered in trying to obtain the duck just a few days before Thanksgiving (we got it, but it was more expensive than it needed to be). We'll have to do something more traditional when we actually have family members here (Sean's brother and my sister, both picky eaters), but in the interim, we might as well experiment.

To the Lighthouse, One More Time

 I did my run through Lighthouse Park this morning for what may not be the absolute last time - I've got sneaky plans to park in the neighborhood on the weekends until it gets super cold - but certainly the last time as a full resident of the Cove. Our moving day is Friday, our house is a warren of color-coded boxes, and still, somehow, it doesn't feel quite real.

This morning, the wind was coming in strongly off the water, and the beach was almost deserted, like it has been for the last couple of weeks. Rounding the corner of the pavilion, seeing the upthrust form of the white lighthouse against the blue sky, I thought the same thing I've thought every time I make that turn, since I begrudgingly began running six or so months ago: "What a gift."

Thank you, Morris Cove. Thank you, Concord Street. 

We Bought A House

 [NB: I started this post on 9/21 and then never finished it, but decided not to re-edit the whole thing] I've been holding off on posting anything because it didn't feel like it was going to really happen, but considering that I dropped off a very large cashier's check to our attorney this afternoon, it feels pretty real! I just looked at my bank account, and seeing it back to "normal" levels after the high-water mark of the last few weeks is actually kind of reassuring. Sean's mom decided at the end of July that she wanted to sell Concord Street, which precipitated our house search much earlier than we had planned, like, by more than a year. It was stressful since we knew the market was hot, even though we were as yet only dimly aware of how hot, but we also got incredibly lucky - and again, we didn't realize just how lucky until later. 

One of our limitations was that we really wanted a house in Branford, which (because it's nice!) had fewer options than towns like Milford or North Haven. Our other requirements were central air and non-oil heat, and no raised ranches. We looked at a couple of houses with Linda and Gary, and after one of those visits we actually drove by the house we're buying, but since there was no For Sale sign, we figured it was off the market already. We knew we needed a realtor, and one of Sean's coworkers recommended the father of a former student, who is based in Branford and helped her buy a house. At this point we'd been "looking" for about a week. We met Steve on a Thursday, and liked him. We looked at a couple of houses on the computer together in his office, he explained the MLS system that he would get us access to, and at the end we asked about the "blue house," which was not in MLS because it was for sale by owner. He said he'd check on it. Saturday we went up to see a house in Hamden, which was, um, idiosyncratic (and confirmed for me what Sean had known all along: Branford or bust), and then back to Branford to see the blue house. 

Reader, I loved it the second we walked in. Everything was immaculate and new, but not the cheap new of a flipped house (which after looking at listings, you can begin to spot even in the photos). It's a split level, which isn't a house style I ever thought we'd wind up in. There had been three bedrooms, but in the massive overhaul of the house, which was done when the current owners bought it, they moved a wall and turned the third bedroom into a massive walk-in-closet. This actually made is somewhat less desirable on the market because anyone with a family usually wants three bedrooms or more, but they only have 1 teen kid, so it had worked for them (and we have 0 kids, so it works for us too!). As we learned, they were selling because they had realized that the husband's father was going to need to live with them sooner rather than later, and there was just no room. They even apparently looked into building an addition (and space is not an issue, since the 1.75 acres, including pond, was actually the least desirable feature to me), but decided it would be less of a hassle to move. That's why everything was so wonderful and new; they'd overseen the replacement of everything from the roof to the central air just two years ago, expecting to stay long term. Obviously, this sucks for them, but it was amazing for us. 

We were out in the backyard, looking at the massive shed, when I told Sean I wanted the house. He agreed, so we told Steve and he headed back inside to talk to Angela. We put in an offer a little shy of asking price the same night. We hadn't actually signed our representation agreement with Steve, nor had we gotten a mortgage pre-approval (though we quickly got that handled). We figured we were just starting out with looking, and everyone warned us it would take a long time to find a place we liked. Nope. After a small negotiation, we beat out the other offer, from sellers who were apparently offering more money but had less assurance of getting financing. 

[Continuing today] We had offered a long close when we made our initial offer, since the sellers (Angela and Tony) needed to buy their own place. Making an offer at the beginning of August for a closing scheduled for 9/29 turned out to be an excruciating wait. Everything you read and everyone who's bought a home before warns you that anything can and will go wrong in the process, from the inspection to the appraisal to the underwriting, so there's little use in celebrating until you have the keys in hand. I will admit that I was also super neurotic about the reason that they were selling -- what if the father-in-law died suddenly (still a global pandemic, after all!) and our sellers decided they didn't need to move after all? Yes, my mind goes those places. Steve explained that the sale contract goes two ways, so they just couldn't decide not to sell at this point (without leaving themselves open to a lawsuit, anyway). I also had a dream that the kids slept over, went out during the night, and fell in the pond - my sister's perfectly laconic response was "they can't reach the locks. Also, they're afraid of the dark. You're fine."

We had the inspection, which I wasn't worried about, considering how new everything was and the level of care that had clearly gone into the house, and I was right! The inspector couldn't praise the quality of the work enough and had virtually no items to report. His biggest note for us was that the shed would need a new roof sooner rather than later. The next hurdle: the bank appraised the house at $14k less than what we'd agreed to pay. Steve explained that this was happening a lot, since the comps from sales months earlier hadn't yet caught up to the heat of the summer Covid market. Usually you ask the seller if they'll negotiate on the purchase price after a low appraisal, maybe meet in the middle, but our sellers told Steve that they'd had a cash offer from a NYC buyer who would take it sight unseen if we couldn't meet the price. Well, OK then. We know how fortunate we are in this - the down payment may have been our own savings, but knowing we could dip into what is still (until my 35th birthday next week) technically a "trust fund" made all the difference. Thank you, parents!

The final piece was waiting for the underwriting to be completed. I know from what I've read online that we had perhaps the smoothest experience possible under current conditions, and it was still frustrating. You send them a document they ask for and then have to provide it in two other slightly different ways to satisfy them...and then they ask for the original one again. But we have a 2.75% fixed interest rate and we got to closing without issues, so I really can't complain in the end! We were even able to move our closing up to 9/23. Closings in the time of Covid aren't as ceremonious as they used to be; instead of us, our agent, and the sellers all meeting with the attorney at once, it was just me and Sean in his office (which happened to be down the road from Linda). It didn't even involve a "presentation of the keys" - that had happened at the house, an hour earlier, as Angela and Tony walked us through everything before they left. It was really sweet, actually - Tony's focus was on all the mechanicals and the structure of the house, so he was telling us that the crown molding work was done so well there aren't settling marks, and if we need that kind of work we want to contact Frank Capuano, but we don't want Frank, he's terrible to deal with -- it's Frank Capuano's cousin who did the good work. Angela was impatient with his stories, but wanted to reiterate that everything had been cleaned. The house was basically spotless, but she apologized that she hadn't had time to polish the stainless steel in the kitchen because she'd already packed the cleaner, haha. 

And with that, we're homeowners! Or as I like to say, considering the (terrifyingly large) 1.75 acres of property, including pond, that now is in my name: we're landed gentry. 

End of May

This is one of those cold early-summer mornings that we'll be thinking about wistfully in a month or so. I woke up freezing and had to put on a bathrobe to come downstairs for coffee. Now I'm sitting on the porch at the table that's officially become my sewing spot over the last few months, after the final detritus of Sean's graduate school career was tucked away, and the sun is just coming in the back windows to provide a little warmth to the side of my face.

On Friday I went to the Sound Runner in Branford to get fitted for real running shoes. Carla had told me that she always buys a full size larger shoe for running than what she normally wears, and lo and behold, after having me step on that little metal contraption that I felt like I hadn't encountered since childhood, the salesperson suggested I try a size 9. A short while later and $130 lighter, I left with a pair of Brooks - which Carla later told me were also the first running shoes she had (surely that augurs well for the running enterprise!) Yesterday was the first run I did with them, and they were so much more comfortable than the cross-trainers I'd been using. I still have something weird going on with my right foot, so now that I can cross off "need appropriate shoes" I can make an appointment with the orthopedist. I had mentioned this issue at my first and only appointment with him in January (I was there to check on the progress of a strained Achilles), and since I don't have a noticeable problem with my normal gait he suggested they could refer me for physical therapy if - and I quote - "you want to be a runner." I laughed and assured him that I didn't! I was so confident I'd be going to 9Rounds as regularly as I wanted. Oh, you little fool.

I have been making use of the online workouts that 9Round is providing; ideally I'd like to alternate one day running with one day of 9Round. I turned what was once Daniel's room in the basement into my workout corner; I can do pretty much everything except overhead lifts and jumping jacks (because of the lower ceiling) and not feel as awkward as I did when I was working out in the living room. Part of the frustration of not knowing how long all of this will go on is not knowing how much money I should be planning to invest in equipment - because as I've discovered, things like kettlebells and weighted bars are not cheap! You don't need those to do the 9Round online workouts, but at a certain point bodyweight resistance only does so much. I miss hitting the heavy bag. I just can't imagine being back in the physical gym, perhaps until there's a vaccine - the physical space is very small, you're only 3-4 feet from the next person, and with HIIT exercise there's so much huffing and puffing...it's the perfect infection scenario. Since I prepay for the year in full, I haven't had to make a decision, but when October comes around - am I really going to pay that fee for video workouts? :-/ 

I also can't survive on running alone! That said, I am grateful for some of the experiences running has brought me. Yesterday morning, for example, I was excited to try out the new shoes - so much so that even when I discovered my mp3 player was dead I decided to go out with no music (a first!). The weather for the morning on Google just read "fog," and it was not kidding. When I got to the beach, you could barely see the rock jetties in the fog and nothing of the Sound beyond. The only other people there were a woman and a little girl who were playing at the water's edge, and a man standing on one of the jetties. Their figures were sort of hazy, too, because of all the mist. On the return leg, past the lighthouse (I love seeing it! Every time!), usually you're looking across the harbor to New Haven, but I couldn't see anything beyond the shore! It was wild. Under normal circumstances, there's just no reason I'd be in the park at 8:30am on a Saturday, but right now, needs must. 

In reading terms, I finally ordered a copy of Barry Lyndon, which I'd been wanting to read since watching the Kubrick film at Sara and Zach's last summer. I'm about halfway through now, and I can definitely say the movie's an improvement! It was always going to be hard for anything to match up against Vanity Fair, of course; I suppose that book would be considered third-person omniscient, since the narrative not only follows multiple characters but knows their thoughts, in addition to the satirical asides of the Narrator figure. Barry Lyndon is narrated in first-person, so while Thackeray's irony and satire comes through in the way Barry talks about himself,it's much more low-key and limited. What you learn about other characters, for example, is entirely reliant on what Barry wants to report about them. There's also a lot more context that I'm clearly missing, in part because while Vanity Fair is set in a near-contemporary time to Thackeray's own, Barry Lyndon takes place in the mid-to-late 18th century. I don't know anything about the Seven Years' War, or the geography of Prussia, or half of the other things that he makes reference to. I would definitely have benefited from an annotated copy!

Speaking of annotations, before Barry Lyndon arrived I had just finished making my way through an annotated copy of Pride and Prejudice that Sean had given me for Christmas. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from it! Class differences with regard to meal times, for example, or the social change that accompanied the shift from country-style line dances to the more intimate waltz. There were so many minor details that I'd read over in the past that - while not necessary to the understanding of the story - actually meant something that I hadn't understood. It was also nice to have a bit of the commentary on the characters and their development. In the introduction it was mentioned that Austen herself felt like she'd really polished the dialogue, maybe even to too fine a point, and that this is most apparent in places where characters are able to deliver this fine-tuned speeches even while wracked by great emotion. With that having been pointed out to me, I really noticed it! And realized that it's different than Emma or Sense and Sensibility, in which the dialogue is more natural. Fascinating stuff! 

Reading Virginia Woolf

Last week - or was it over the weekend? time loses shape - I re-read Mrs. Dalloway over the course of a day. Fitting, given that the action of the novel also takes place over a single day. I hadn't quite remembered that, nor had I thought, for a very long time, about the concept of "unity" in the Aristotelian sense, which was brought back to me by the otherwise boring preface.

I know I read Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse back in high school for some project for Mrs. Juda, and clearly I had been tasked with searching out various literary devices in the text, because both books are underlined and bracketed throughout with blue pen (I can even picture the kind of pen, the clear plastic Bic with the blue caps!) It annoys me less that I did the underlining than that none of the lines are straight, haha. I underlined "The leaden circles dissolved in the air," a phrase that's repeated a dozen or so times as time moves onward in the narrative. Occasionally I threw in a marginal notation, things like "stream of consciousness" scrawled, again unevenly, on page 13 of Mrs. Dalloway, but my favorite so far is the "!!!" on page 32 of To the Lighthouse as Mrs. Ramsey goes from being furious about a remark of her husband's about how her son's planned excursion won't happen due to weather ("so horrible an outrage of human decency...)" to, after his non-apology, sighing "She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt." Ditto, past self, wtf.

I'm pretty sure that I re-read Mrs. Dalloway at least once since then, but I couldn't find mention of it here in the "archive." What I found myself wishing for now, after I'd finished it, was that there was someone to discuss it with, like you'd get in a really good college class! I wished there was someone to point out to me things that I'd missed or make connections that I'd never think of, someone to debate it with. There are so many incredible characterizations, so many precise pinpointings of some element of human nature, so many phrasings that have stayed with me. "The leaden circles dissolved in the air" is one of them. "Holmes is on you. Human nature is on you" is another.

I remember being kind of bewildered by how emotional Woolf's characters are, or rather how changeable their emotional states seem to be, as they careen from joy to despair, from delight to resentment, in the space of mere lines (see above, both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey in that case) and then pick up and just carry on like none of that emotional maelstrom ever happened. I have the feeling I rolled my eyes a lot when I first read this, and I found myself getting impatient at times on this reading as well. And yet, I have to admit that it probably is in some ways a good characterization of how our minds work, constantly flitting from idea to reaction to sudden thought to perhaps intrusive thought, unless we're really keeping our focus on something.

One of the reviews I looked at online mentioned it as being one of those books you come back to over time, as you age, to see how you approach it differently. I know found myself empathizing with Rezia when I first read it because of what I underlined, like this: "And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard" -- that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought." I had underlined another, earlier line of Rezia's about her isolation amid her troubles: "But failure one conceals." I understand that on a such a deeper level now, as the wife of someone who has struggled with such deep depression. The notion that there are really some things about your marriage that can't be communicated to anyone else, even in the midst of suffering...that really hit home.

I also teased Sean that I recognized myself in Clarissa's opposition of her own nature and passion for "noticing things" to Peter Walsh: "But Peter--however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink--Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope's poetry, people's characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul." That's us! I take pleasure in noticing things for their own sake; today, for example, I spent a few minutes keeping very still in the backyard so I could watch the activities of an eager young robin, who ultimately fled the attentions of another silver-gray bird I don't know the name of. Sean will look at things like that to humor me, but he's not interested in them on their own.

Today I started re-reading To the Lighthouse, which I'm not sure I've re-read since high school. I recall that I didn't like it very much on the first round. Woolf's characters aren't really ever meant to be likable, but this crew is less likable than those in Mrs. Dalloway (cf, Mrs. Ramsey's weird idolization of her husband, a not-too-successful philosophy professor). I like the editions that I have of both books, and they match, which is why I think To the Lighthouse, in particular, has managed to survive moves and purges and even remained in a place of relative honor on the hallway bookcase, rather than relegated to the basement.

"For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst..." We'll see how this re-read goes. If nothing else, the book's title gave me the line that I still say to myself every time I turn onto the beach stretch at the park: "to the lighthouse!"

Quarantine Report

It's hard to believe that I've been working from home for a month already. I haven't had time to be bored. It turns out that online teaching requires an incredible amount of time for preparation, especially with starting a brand new accelerated class online, so for the first few weeks I was definitely working more hours than I would have been during a normal week. The past few days, because of Easter Break, have felt like my first chance to step away from work for a couple of days, and it's been so nice. 

Still, I've been making use of the newfound flexibility of working hours. Sean and I have been walking to Lighthouse Park on any day when it's not raining, and I've (begrudgingly) returned to running there in the morning/afternoon, too. They closed the park entrance to cars, so there's not usually more than a dozen people or so. Often I turn the "corner" onto the beach stretch to see absolutely no one, which is kind of amazing. Turn another "corner" and you see the lighthouse, its comforting, upright bulk silhouetted against blue sky. It gives me genuine pleasure every time it comes into view.

By spending so much time walking around the neighborhood, I've noticed so many things than I would normally have had occasion to pay attention to: the new bird songs, the cute house with a Siamese lounging in the front window, the number of rabbit hutches and chicken coops tucked away in backyards. None of these observations add up to anything, of course, but it's still a pleasure to notice. As someone said on NPR, "we've all become Transcendentalists overnight!"

It seems like everyone is reading books, as we look for ways to not have our eyes on screens all day. Carla told me she's reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, and Sara just finished (though she didn't enjoy) The Beautiful and Damned. So far I've re-read three of Judith Merkle Riley's books (The Serpent Garden, The Master of All Desires, and The Oracle Glass, moving chronologically). I'm not sure what I'll read, or rread next. I pulled Marcus Aurelius' Meditations from the shelf, but more in the rueful "I feel like I should have read this by now" sense than out of genuine interest. I do wish I'd been successful at finding a copy of Barry Lyndon. Rats.

The other development has been sewing! A couple of weeks ago I decided to try making a cloth mask for Sean when he goes to the store, using guidelines the NYTimes had published. Of course, with only shitty thread from a sewing kit and no pins (I had to use bobby pins, which are decidedly not an acceptable substitute), it was slow going, but the mask actually came out great, and I discovered that hand-stitching is pretty relaxing! Then when I went to Jen's this weekend for a social-distancing visit, she gave me her sewing machine and supplies, including good thread, an endless supply of needles and pins, and my mom's old pincushion bracelet. Now, this is an object that I probably would never have recalled the existence of on my own, but I recognized it immediately when I opened the box. My mom wore it all the time when she was sewing, quilting, or otherwise crafting. It's so tiny that it's super snug on my wrist, but it made me so happy to put on! My sister held onto the supplies but has really never used them, so it's possible that most of those pins were exactly where my mom last left them in 2006. Kind of amazing.

Speaking of the passage of time: Wednesday marks 20 years since my dad died, or as we call in this house, "double deathcade." It's hard to conceptualize that 20 years ago I was 14, when it doesn't seem that long ago...

Quarterly Update

Well, I started this entry on March 8 and abandoned it:

in a perfect world, Sara and I would have been in Rome right now, eating San Carlo 1936 patatine and drinking Refosco - alas.

What a long, strange month it's been! In February, I got the genius idea to go visit Carla in Rome during Fairfield's spring break. She finally moved into a real apartment with a second bedroom (albeit one with a tiny, monastic bed). I found a $500 non-stop ticket, which was amazing, and convinced Sara to join me, which was even more amazing - it would have been the first time Sara and Carla saw each other since my wedding, which is just wild to me.

Honestly, the week after I bought the ticket was just so exciting. I made a long list of everything I wanted to eat (the aforementioned chips and wine, but also gelato from the "goat milk man" in Monteverde Vecchio, suppli from the vendor in our neighborhood, coffee from all the places, but mostly from the bar at the Academy), a much shorter list of places I actually wanted to visit (mostly I just wanted to wander the streets again), and a tiny list of people I wanted to see (Carla, and her "coven" of friends, and Gabri, Claudia, and the other AAR staff). Then Marice told me that the department would pay for my plane ticket as a "research trip," and that the Humanities Institute would probably give me $250 for food as part of their quick-grant program, which just made it all even better! I'm grateful, now for those days of bubbly excitement and anticipation.

Obviously our trip didn't happen. Italy became a viral hotspot (though for Carla's sake, I'm grateful the focolai are in the north, not Rome or, worse, the poorer south). The Academy closed its doors and sent all the fellows home (and how bitter it would have been, to have that be your fellowship year). The Raphael show celebrating his 500th anniversary at the Quirinale, which I would have gotten to see, closed without ever opening to the public.

It's looking very unlikely that our trip to London and Edinburgh will happen in June. My travel to San Francisco for a conference in May, which would have given me the chance to see Nathan for the first time in four years, has already been canceled, as has another conference in Kansas in June. I'm honestly bummed about the second one, because when am I ever going to go to freaking Kansas? Also that's a fun conference because it's only for academic art museums.

Obviously, these are the minor complaints of a privileged person. We're both healthy; both of us have jobs; our loved ones, so far, are safe. Sara and I are making plans to visit Carla next March, instead, in celebration of what will be Sara's 35th birthday. And, as I told my students during our last class before spring break (what turned out to be the last time I would see them in person), they don't call Rome the Eternal City for nothing. It will be there, waiting for us. And it will be amazing.

End of Year

I was on the Blogger site a couple of days ago looking for something (we were trying to remember exactly when my cat Sapphire was put to sleep) and realized that I haven't updated since August. Sean said "oh, it's because we're adults so less interesting stuff happens," but that's not really the purpose of this for me. I told him: this is memory storage! I don't have his incredible capacity for recall, and so often he'll be telling me about something we did, a place we went, something we saw, and I might only vaguely recall it. I can't even imagine what it'll be like when I get older. That's why I need the blog, and there have indeed been things I've thought of in the last few months that I should put down here, but then I never got around to it. But hey, end of 2019, time to wrap up!

This fall I taught a course entitled "The Long 19th-Century: European Art in the Age of Rodin." It was an experimental mash-up of art history and museum studies, with the research projects focusing on the Rodin sculpture show and the accompanying print show (curated by yours truly). It was a Tuesday evening turbo, 5-7:30, which was exhausting; luckily, now that teaching is an official part of my position I'll never teach in the evenings again! The class was fun, especially the parts that were hands-on, like letting them handle some of our prints or the 40-lb bronze tiger I borrowed from sculptor Michael Keropian, and taking them "behind the scenes" into our storage room and into the BHG before we hung the print show. It was also a lot of work, and there were definitely aspects of it that could have been improved--two research projects was too much for the students, for example, given that only half of the group of 13 were art history majors/minors, and I was waaaaay too easy on them in terms of grading.

I won't ever be teaching this specific class again, since it was tied to our special exhibitions, but my chief professional triumph of the semester was getting a new course approved for the university curriculum: AH 296 Museum Exhibition Seminar! For those outside an academic setting it doesn't really sound like a big deal, but Fairfield is actually quite strict about adding new courses, so I'd been advised that there might be some resistance, but according to Marti, who sits on the general curriculum committee, it passed with flying colors! The next time I will teach it, in Fall 2020, it will be designed to get the students involved in researching and creating materials for our Lalla Essaydi show in spring 2021.

My class this spring (MR 2-3:15, thank you God) is one of the newly-revamped intro courses that are focused around 6 "paradigm monuments" that will be explored in greater depth. I'm taking over the one designed by Kathy, Technology and Art, and taking it from 1500-1950. My technologies are oil paint (Mona Lisa), bronze casting (the Benin bronzes), porcelain (a Ming bowl), printmaking (The Great Wave), photography (Migrant Mother), and acrylic (Autumn Rhythm). The goal of the new introductory courses is to provide an overview of how art history can be done, rather than the old "survey" that attempts to load the most significant 80 or so objects onto the students' heads. I'm hoping it will be fun, even though my class list is about 85% male upperclassmen Finance majors who are finally getting around to their VPA requirement. I'm doing my best to incorporate as much "hands on" as possible, which is why I've been working on growing our teaching collection -- artists' tools, raw pigments, primed and unprimed canvas, plus actual art objects I've bought like a 1920s lithographic stone, or my most recent acquisition, aided by Ive, of a Japanese lacquer box to accompany our spring show on lacquer. I've also got to try to convert a cheap digital camera to an IR camera by removing the filter (as suggested by a visiting physicist who is teaching an Art and Physics class). X-rays, alas, will always be beyond me.

The rest of my job is also going great! Sean likes to joke that I'm de facto assistant director now, which is kinda accurate given we have a staff of only 3.5 (with Megan now our part-time registrar in addition to teaching Egyptian art). Carey and I do get along really well work-wise, which I'm grateful for. There's been a lot of discussion about creating a new museum on campus, and it seems there is both the institutional will and external cash to make this happen. Replacing the old Dolan school of business was one suggestion, or taking over/expanding the Jesuit residence have both been floated. Accordingly we've had a lot of discussions about what we'd like to see in a new building, and my only asks were 1) a window and 2) a place where we can eat lunch that's not the museum classroom. Honestly only the first one is a "must," because windowless offices suck! Any new museum is several years out, of course, so it's not like I'd have to say goodbye tomorrow, but I'll be sad to leave Bellarmine Hall. At least once a week as I'm going upstairs to make coffee I think to myself how grateful I am to work in a space that is lovely, with its Great Hall and the views over Long Island Sound.

In family terms, the niblings are growing apace!

Leon is eight months old, 22 pounds, and tall for his age, though "tall" seems barely appropriate for a kid who is only just about able to stand up on his own. Charlie has proven himself to be an excellent big brother overall, excited to help with his brother and share with him, but he also runs right over him in his enthusiasm a lot, as happened when they were at our house this weekend. Leon takes it all in stride, and it helps that he's not a delicate flower as he's getting trampled into the carpet by a 4-year-old! As always, if I go up to Jen's house by myself I'm the star, but when they come here and Uncle Sean is around, I'm barely deserving of notice! Story of my life, haha.

Poor Sean has been sick over the holidays once again, a resurgence of a cold he had earlier in the month combined with the exhaustion of being a teacher giving 110% (example: despite being on antibiotics, he went to the basketball game on Friday night, and then promptly spent the entirety of Saturday in bed!). In addition to the general student appreciation of "the Doc," he now has a whole crew of kids who play setback with him and Kathy, the education intervention specialist, both during free periods and after school--these kids even showed up last week, during vacation, to play because they knew Sean and Kathy would be in the building. (I, by the way, am known to the kids as "Mrs. Doc," so Sean does get to have a "Mrs." in some capacity after all!) Sean says you can actually see a difference in some kids who clearly needed some sort of social structure to bring them out of themselves, especially with the chance to interact with adults who care about them. We frequently discuss how different Notre Dame is in that respect from NWC; I didn't need or want this kind of personal engagement with teachers, and I'm pretty sure most of the teachers--while wonderful--were not as personally invested as many of the ND teachers seem to be.

In other, miscellaneous news, I've finally had to retire my original boxing gloves:

 One of the trainers at the gym mentioned that you should replace them every year and I thought "oh crap!" These were three years old. Lo and behold, got my new gloves (same brand as I had before) and was pleasantly surprised at how "fluffy" they felt, haha. Of course I've been out of the gym for almost two weeks after doing *something* to the bottom of my left heel; the doctor was kind of puzzled and called it "inflammation of the connective tissue," as a diagnosis of exclusion (in that it's not Achilles and not plantar fascitis). They did say I could keep working out as long as I avoid anything that bothers it, like plank and lunges and anything with full flexing of the ankle. I was going to make my return this morning, but it's rainy, and so I've lazily postponed it to tomorrow!

In travel news, we're going to London and Edinburgh in June! We have to squeeze it in between when Sean's school year ends and when I have to be in Kansas for a conference, so there will be no chance to rent a car and follow my Jane Austen fantasies around all the big country houses in England this time (also, I'm super anxious at the thought of driving on the other side of the road). Carla's going to meet us in Edinburgh for a weekend, like she did in Istanbul and Paris. Don't those trips seem a lifetime ago? Jesus. We also recently decided our next trip after that will be back to Italy--not to Rome, though we both do miss it, but to Liguria and Piedmont, ie the northeast corner that we've never visited. We'll have a "local" guide, too, since Piedmont with its Barbaresco vineyards is Carla's favorite travel haunt inside Italy.

Travel saving is the minor add-on to the larger savings goal for a house down payment, though. We're about halfway to what we decided was our goal of having 30% or more for our target price range. We both know we're privileged that, barring catastrophe, we can live here for pretty much as long as we want, and with Sean's aunt no longer living next door, it's a much more attractive prospect. Sean usually spends Sundays scrolling through Zillow and showing me houses so we can argue over them, though the chief debate is usually just location. Milford makes more sense in terms of my commute and general availability, but we both love Branford and it's objectively the nicer town. As Sean says "everything we love is in Branford! All our favorite restaurants are there!" True: Home, Le Petit Cafe, and Rossovino are probably our favorites. Who can say? A lot will depend on what's out there when we finally decide to look for real; neither of us is interested in a fixer-upper, so we've had to adjust our price expectations accordingly. We're also lucky to have a lot of, hm, "institutional knowledge" in Sean's extended family + friends in terms of who's an electrician, who's a contractor, who's a builder--the kind of people who would be happy to take a walk-through and give us an honest opinion. And then, of course, Linda can be our decorator, haha!

Kondo-ing

Sean has been largely amused by my efforts to "Kondo" the house during my down time this month. I read her book a couple of years ago, and did find it helpful to conceptualize "sparking joy" as a reason to keep or discard something. I have little patience for the animist side of her approach, though (I will never thank my purse at the end of a day) and at the time had no interest in folding all of my clothes according to her system.

This new effort started not with Kondo's book, but rather with the basement clean-out that was underway when I arrived home. Over the years, our side of the basement, together with the "back basement," has functioned as an unfortunate dumping ground for Sean's brother, cousin, and aunt. It's always irritated me, but while his aunt lived on the other side there was very little I could do about it. Now, with his aunt moved out to a house with her own damn basement to store things in, the side next door  is about to be converted into a rental, complete with -- finally! -- a locking door separating the two basements. It was a perfect opportunity. Linda and I emptied the back basement as much as we could, with the help of a Dumpster and repeated trips to Goodwill. Then I pushed everything that belonged to Sean's aunt and cousin that had been on our side into the "back basement" for them to pick up or discard at their leisure. Sean's cousin appears to never have gotten rid of any clothing since, like, high school. I packed up two trashbags just of shoes - one bag for sneakers and one bag for monster stilettos. She had more shoes chilling in our basement than Sean and I collectively own!

We might not be minimalists, but we strive not to be over-consumers either. The presence of unused, unwanted crap in the house sets my teeth on edge. I admit to getting pleasure from the act of donating or discarding things we don't need. As Sean was recounting his dad last night, occasionally this leads me into a certain...over-exuberance of discarding, as when I allegedly got rid of the reusable plastic straws that fit with the caps for his shake container. In general, though, I follow Kondo's point that you can't discard other people's belongings. Well, not unless they've been abandoned in your basement for five years, anyway.

I discovered only after my repeated trips to Goodwill that the Vietnam Veterans Association would have actually picked everything up at the house after Jordy pointed out that Goodwill isn't exactly the best place to donate to. After that big purge, though, the most I usually have at one time is just a box or a bag that's not worth calling someone for. Said box, for example, is currently occupied by a decorative glass jar thing that had been on top of our fridge since Linda lived here, and a Scrabble dictionary Sean would never let me use. I admit it: Goodwill is what's most convenient when I want something gone now.

After the basement had been cleared, I was able to move a big bookcase that used to be in the boiler room on the other side into Daniel's old room. One of our big problems has always been a lack of storage for two significantly-sized book collections, and roughly half of our books had been sitting in either plastic bins or cardboard boxes from my Philadelphia move in 2012. One of my goals, which we accomplished in stages, was going through all of our books, removing them from the shelves and deciding which ones to keep and which ones to donate or, in the case of fancy scholarly books, bring to the Book Trader. Sean was able to discard plenty of books from grad school, and I cleaned out the nest of art history survey tomes under my bed. In the end, three boxes went to Goodwill and two to the Book Trader. The freed shelf space combined with the new bookcase means we now only have two clear plastic bins in storage, with a single layer of books in each; everything else has a home on a shelf! [edit: it turns out I didn't need to do so much sleuthing to find that Dinosaur Story book I mentioned in the previous post, because I had saved the actual book! It, along with a bunch of others, like the Snoopy book my grandparents had sent me one Valentine's Day, went to Jen for future nibling use]

The Kondo-ing of the clothes really only took the form of the folding, which I did in one huge go at the start of the month while Sean was on his ND retreat. It's long been annoying to us that our larger dresser gives the clothes stored in it - well, anything cotton, anyway - a musty smell that reminds me of my grandfather. I emptied it out, let the drawers sit overnight with baking soda, then wiped them with vinegar and water (this is why it was good for Sean to be away) and rewashed all the clothes that had been in them. Then I Kondo-folded them so that everything is folded on its side and you can see everything at a glance when you open each drawer. I was inspired to try this in part by Anna, who had mentioned a few months ago that she does the Kondo fold method. If a working woman with two kids can keep that system rolling, I have no excuse, right? As I discovered, the folding itself is quite meditative. It also requires you to handle each piece of clothing, which helps you notice things - socks with threadbare heels, yellowed undershirts - that you might more easily overlook if you were just hastily tossing things in a drawer. And, if you were looking to downsize things you don't wear, it sort of forces you to confront the materiality of your clothes as you fold them, giving you more time to think about whether you really need that umpteenth soft shirt for sleeping in. It's quite clever, that way! Now, according to Kondo, pretty much everything that's not a dress would be happier folded, but I have neither time nor space for that; nor am I going to purchase separators or boxes to keep things even more orderly within the drawers. Overall, though, it's space-saving and very easy to spot what you want to grab.

One of our last Kondos was the cabinet with our DVDs, CDs, and games. I found the two CD holders I had shoved in there: a faux-leather one purchased at an FYE-type store on Cottage Grove Road before my trip to Europe sophomore year of high school, one sleeve of which had the label from my dad's garage-door opener with the code on it in my mom's pretty handwriting, and a fabric one purchased sometime in college, one sleeve of which had a pressed edible violet from a meal Meredith, Carla, Anna and I shared in Ravenna when we studied abroad. The CDs themselves were a mishmash, dating all the way back to middle school. I own not one, but two Creed CDs, thank you 8th grade! Some of them I threw out (Nickelback, Dave Matthews Band) and then whittled the nostalgia-factor ones (Britney Spears, Staind) down into the smaller CD holder, which I brought along in the car yesterday when I drove to visit my sister. And wow, had I forgotten how hard it is to jam a disc back into those little sleeves while you're on the highway! Some of the CDs really brought me back in time, like my horribly-scratched-up Perfect Circle, while others (Eve 6) were pretty meh and are getting trashed. I will save the holder, though, for the continued embarrassing reminder of the crap I spent actually money on in times past!

Conclusion

This last week was a marathon, intellectually speaking. Monday through Wednesday were our presentations, organized into three-hour colloquia. It's unfortunate that only at the end was I able to fully understand what everyone had been working on! A two-minute introduction on Day 1 simply wasn't as helpful. I voiced to someone else that this past month has been so packed and so compressed, imagine if we now had another month to work together more casually, building on the new knowledge that we've all shared? Alas, the grace of the NEH only extends so far. Also, I really want to go home.

Thursday we were visited by the NEH chairman and then had a final three-hour wrap-up session in the afternoon before adjourning for a final happy hour and a closing dinner. Without quite intending to, I Irish-goodbyed everyone when I went outside to talk to Linda and came back to find that some people had headed off to a bar and others were headed back to the dorm. Oh well!

Yesterday was my last day of Doing Stuff. I went to Natural History when it opened, had another deeply visceral encounter with the megalodon model hanging in the cafe (literally all my muscles clench when I look at it, ahhhhh), which I returned to because they pull quite a nice espresso, and then went upstairs to the gems and minerals section. The Hope diamond room was basically empty, which is a far cry from what I remember from 1998, when you filed in a line past a sort of alcove in the wall and were vaguely disappointed to see that it was blue. Now it's in the center of a room in a glass case where it slowly rotates every few seconds, not only guaranteeing greater visual access, but showing off the sparkling fire of the gem and its elaborate necklace setting. In the same room was this incredible natural sheet of copper, which formed between layers of shale in Michigan:

There was another room of jewelry, much of it donated by Harry Winston (the didactic text kept emphasizing "and now these belong to the people of the United States," as if we were going to accuse them of something), and then the proper galleries full of crystals and minerals. It was absolutely gorgeous, and again largely unoccupied, which is key. I still have trouble believing that this is a natural mineral and not Cubist sculpture:

From there I went to the "Last Dinosaurs in America" gallery, which turned out to have way cooler fossils than the crowded dino hall downstairs--a triceratops and a T-rex! This gallery announced itself as being more experimental and open-ended, and I really appreciated how much effort went into explaining how paleontologists' understanding of dinosaurs has changed in the last century and how it's likely to change in the future. There was a display exploring how an artist works with both data and his imagination to create renderings of dinosaurs, next to a display comparing the Field Museum's early 20thc mural of a triceratops facing off against a T-rex with a 2014 version, highlighting differences, like the more active stance given to the triceratops, the angle at which the T-rex is holding its tail, and their skin colors (once uniformly grey-green and now much more distinctive). The Field mural indeed looked like the cover of the dinosaur book I loved so much as a kid, the one with the audiotape for you to read along, complete with ominous music. I remember being so afraid when they would tell you that the T-Rex was "as tall as a two-story house," because my house was a two-story house!

Once again, a little Google sleuthing has led me to it: Joanna Cole's Dinosaur Story, first published in 1974 but made into a Scholastic cassette in the 1980s!

Oh man, good (terrifying) times. From there I went into the cabinet of curiosities galleries, which explore some of the basic questions like "where did the museum get all this stuff" and features some really interesting objects, like a set of delicate sake cups that were part of the diplomatic exchange during the Perry expedition (something I'll be talking about in my Art and Tech class in the spring!), a full-size Audubon book that was in a darkened case lit by a motion sensor, a lion shot by Teddy Roosevelt as part of a Smithsonian exhibition to obtain specimens for the new museum, and the last passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha.

While I appreciated that there was an effort at transparency and honesty in this gallery in particular, this month has made me so much more attuned to language in museums. For example, that monumental painted house front from an Alaskan tribe "was collected" for a World's Fair in the 19th century. "Collected" is a wonderfully flexible word that can conceal all manner of sins; they put people on display in human zoos at those fairs, after all. That's not to say that there was anything more involved than a financial transaction in this particular instance, but the part reminds you of the dirty whole. And, linked to that, the whole question of whose culture goes on view in "Natural History" and whose goes on view in the art museum. There was a panel addressing that question. It explained that human artifacts are included because we're part of nature, etc. etc.--but they're not going to put a Raphael painting or a Roman sculpture in this gallery, are they? But they'll put a Hawaiian feather cape and a Japanese samurai suit steps away from the example of what dinosaur fossils look like when they're freshly excavated.

Speaking of excavation, I'm also more disturbed by the casual display of bodies in museums. Thanks to NAGPRA, none of these can be Native Americans anymore, but Egyptian mummies always seem to get a pass. Why? Because of their greater antiquity? I'm not saying they shouldn't be studied, but do the bodies have to remain on display? Is it important to always have "the thing itself" when the "thing" was a person? In the cabinet gallery, there was a skeleton of an American who helped obtain specimens for the museum; his descendants donated his body for study and display because they felt that's what he would have wanted. I heard someone commenting on his very fine teeth. An accompanying photograph shows the initial evaluation of the skeleton, still in its opened coffin, looking very much like a mummy picture.  In the picture it's clear that his jaws were gaping wide when they opened it, but on display they've been very decorously wired shut into an eternal smile.

From Natural History I popped briefly into American History and then I walked up to Woodward Table to meet Sarah and David. She wanted to go there not only because it's her favorite but because it's shutting down in a matter of weeks. The food was excellent; I had beef short ribs, a protein feast for the subsequent afternoon's march! After lunch I went back to American History, but didn't spend too much time there. Seeing the 1812 Star Spangled Banner was cool, but I have zero interest in Dorothy's ruby slippers or the Batmobile (which they light conspicuously with these neon pink and blue lights, which I suspect is intended to prevent you from perceiving that it doesn't look like it does in the movie--it looks much cheaper and plastic-ier!)

By this point it was 3:30, my feet were tired, and I had two more hours before museums closed. There are only a handful of museums I've not seen, and they're all the more commercial ones: Newseum, Spy Museum, Museum of the Bible. I'm kind of museumed-out, honestly. I caught the circulator bus to the Jefferson Memorial, which is currently undergoing a cleaning of the dome. It's so strange to see an imitation Pantheon dome with no oculus! Then I walked the path that leads you to FDR's memorial, and MLK's. It was really fucking hot, but not very humid, and the Mall's pathways are quite shaded. Nevertheless, I was sweating like a beast! I walked up to the Korean Veterans Memorial, crossed in front of the Lincoln (which was absolutely swarmed with tourists) and walked through the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. At some point this month it came up (maybe Jamie's presentation?) that just as all avant-garde art gets normalized in time, Maya Lin's deeply-controversial black marble has become a de facto element of "monument syntax," though the original meaning (mourning, yes, but also self-implication, as you look at your reflection amid the names) gets subsumed into patriotic and nationalistic messages that were starkly absent in her work.

From the mall I walked north to catch the free circulator that would return me to Georgetown, and picked up some junk food for dinner. Just as I was slowly making my way back to campus, I got an email inviting me to dinner with those who were still around. I had to be honest--after a sweaty day on the mall, I was all about a cold shower, AC, and Netflix! Today, too, I decided not to bother doing anything. I'm going to pack, I can work more on my syllabi, and I'm going to get drinks later with some people who were on the victorious "Destination Curation" trivia team that was earned itself a $25 gift certificate to a Georgetown pub on Tuesday. But I'm not Doing Things. That time has ended. I'm going hoooooome!

Baltimore

Yesterday I left Georgetown at 9am. With the rush hour traffic (we're on the opposite side of the city from Union Station) and MARC train delays, I got into Baltimore at 12pm and it was already blazing hot. I walked the 15 minutes from the station to the Walters Museum, staying in the shade of the buildings along Charles Street, and still had to take a time-out, dry-off break in the ladies room when I arrived. Charming.

I've heard the Walters recommended by so many people, and it absolutely lived up to the hype. What a fantastic collection. One gallery is reinstalled to mimic the ca. 1884 installation in the family's home:

A nearby gallery displays Faberge eggs and Lalique jewelry in the context of the Walters men's collecting activities at various World's Fairs. A monitor displayed four early videos created around the time of the World's Fair in Paris in 1900, three of them by Edison including a video ascending the Eiffel Tower's elevator.

One of the great strengths of the collection is Academic art. So many of the names on view - Fortuny, Madrazo, Bonnat, Gerome - brought me back to Dr. Braddock's Eakins class, for which I wrote a paper entitled "Patterns of Influence: Mariano Fortuny, Raimundo Madrazo, and Thomas Eakins" (thank you search function). In the "salon-hang" room above, Alma-Tadema's exquisite Sappho and Alcaeus stuck out, not least because it often crops up as the background in my Google Arts & Culture add-on.

They have a number of pictures by him, all on a relatively small scale. I particularly liked the Triumph of Titus and the humorous My Sister is Not In. Other favorites (I'm a sucker for Academic recreations of antiquity, what can I say?) include Gerome's Death of Caesar and Ingres' Oedipus and the Sphinx, the latter of which was tickling my brain because it was familiar and yet not. It turns out that I was remembering Moreau's version, which appeared in that encyclopedia set my dad had, in the volume on fable and mythology that I read over and over as a kid. My mom got rid of the whole set in an abrupt clean-out and some point, and I was so disappointed! I've never been able to figure out what it was; all I remember was that it had red binding, and was also probably not a true encyclopedia given that it was organized thematically. 

[ETA: I found it! Turns out the key was putting in "thematic" encyclopedia, and I discovered Richards Topical Enyclopedia, with several people commenting about how they learned mythology from Volume 14. Thanks to Archive.org, I just skimmed through a few pages to see if the artwork matched up...and there it is, Moreau's Odysseus and the Sphinx, on page 444! I can't believe I just solved one of the great lingering mysteries of my childhood! Thank you, internet. Also amusing is noting that there is no caption information for any of the artwork used to illustrate, only photo credits! I guess that's why I only took away the half-remembered images themselves. I just emailed my sister about this, I can't believe I found the damned thing after all this time!]

The Walters also has one of the most stunning and comprehensive medieval galleries I've ever seen, and perhaps most significant, the display isn't weighted toward Western Europe, but includes everything from Russia to Ethiopia and everywhere in between. I actually felt overwhelmed. It was a surfeit of beauty, and I just wandered through the gallery, my eyes sort of sliding over the objects in gold, silver, and ivory. Those galleries slide seamlessly into the Moorish and Islamic spaces, and then in a mezzanine you find yourself in a 15th-century Venetian palace, with three massive, recently-restored panels from Ca' Corner in Venice depicting the Abduction of Helen:

The table in the middle is for visitors to sit at or play checkers if they wish, but the furniture, the style of the fireplace and the roof beams, combine with the art objects to effectively evoke elite domestic space while still managing to avoid the "period room" effect. I mean, I personally kind of like period rooms, but as someone here pointed out, they are literally frozen in time and never change.

From the Walters, I took an Uber to the Baltimore Museum of Art, near Johns Hopkins' campus on the northern side of the city. Right near the museum, I saw a blank pedestal, which some Googling revealed had been a statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, one of four statues removed in 2017. The BMA was another awesome space, and I'm so glad I saw it. The atrium of the central courtyard is presided over by the great, gloomy Thinker (and now that I know he was once intended to be Dante, I can't miss the lappet of his cap), while the walls are covered in mosaics unearthed in Antioch in the 1930s. The collection of the Cone sisters includes a huge collection of work by Matisse (including the Blue Nude that was burned in effigy by art students in Chicago after it appeared at the 1913 Armory Show), and a marvelous Mother and Child by Picasso from what is apparently called his Neoclassical period: 

So many of the pieces I've seen would be excellent for teaching, in some context, so I'm writing it here to remind myself: Remington's Bronco-buster, cast more than 300 times in 20 years, and what it encapsulates about American myth; Kara Walker's Terrible Vacation, a return to Turner's Slave Ship in gouache; Mickalene Thomas' Dejeneur sur l'herbe: les trois femmes noires, a photograph of a restaged Manet in MoMA's sculpture garden.

From the BMA, another Uber whisked me back to the station, where the MARC trains were, ironically, the only thing on the board not significantly delayed. Back in DC at rush hour, I decided to be economical and take the free circulator back to Georgetown, but just my luck, it was running 30 minutes behind schedule! Even standing in the shade, with a slight breeze, with a bottle of water, it was pretty unpleasant. I had dinner at Sweetgreen and then walked back to Georgetown, and even though it was just around 8pm by the time I got back the heat was ridiculous. Today and tomorrow the heat index is going to be around 110-112, so I have no plans besides working from indoors--the door, the library, whatever. I'm glad I have one more weekend here! I still haven't been to the American History museum, and I'd like to pop back into the NGA to see if the Bellini's been returned yet, and maybe see the gems at the Natural History Museum. Happily next weekend looks much more manageable!

Special Collections

Yesterday was our final, marathon day of seminar. The afternoon was long, but kicked off in an awesome way thanks to Gretchen's husband, who works in Georgetown's Special Collections. They brought out some of their treasures and laid them not for us to not only see, but handle (being librarians, they were very proud to note that everything in the room was still meant to be used, even the mystery item insured for $25 million). The treasures included a Shakespeare First Folio, and a copy of the Federalist papers which was signed by Hamilton, Monroe, and John Jay after each article that they'd each written, yearbook-style (so now I know that Hamilton wrote most of them). There was Georg Braun's 1617 book of world maps and city views, an early edition of Vesalius, a one-of-a-kind, massive pressed herbarium put together at Georgetown in the 19th century, and even fragments of demotic and hieroglyphic.

The kicker, though, was spread out innocently on a back table: the first few pages of the autograph manuscript of Tom Sawyer, together with Twain's letter to "Friend Bliss," his manager Elisha Bliss, reminding him to have a dedicatory inscription to Twain's wife added to the book:

 The Preface pages were written smoothly enough (though there was one word that I couldn't read, which turned out to have been "combination"), but the first page had scratch-outs and superscript additions and just reminds you of all the work that went into producing a final copy, back before you could just hit the delete button, over and over. We debated, later, whether the First Folio or the Twain was likely to have been the $25 million policy. I checked and there's more than 200 First Folios still in circulation, but you only get one original manuscript, so my money's on Twain.

Hildreth Meiere Interlude

Shortly after I arrived here, it occurred to me to reach out to Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, which oddly enough is in D.C. and not in Cambridge. They have two mosaics by Hildreth Meiere which were originally part of an ensemble created to go above the elevators in the Prudential building in Newark in the 1960s, one of the artist's last commissions before her death. Our exhibition has the scale model for the composition, as well as a huge preparatory study of Hercules on his skiff, surrounded by leaping dolphins, a motif that Meiere copied from an ancient Greek kylix. Happily, they were willing to let me come check them out.

The path to the CHS takes you through an offshoot of "Diplomats Row," so it's all embassies, which is fun to look at from out the window of a car! I wonder how they determine who gets which mansion--if a new country is recognized, where do they put them? Oh, and Turkey's embassy has a statue of Ataturk on the street corner, naturally. The CHS "campus" is at the top of a dead-end street. On the map, the property abuts other side of the Dumbarton Woods from Georgetown, and so Google suggested a half-hour walking route that took you through one of the trails. It was 98 degrees, so no thanks!

Past the gate, you walk up a drive to see a cluster of a half-dozen small houses, all painted pure white like houses on a Greek isle, and at the top a low building with a rounded Doric temple-front.

Through the broad glass door, you could see directly through to the interior, where one of the massive mosaic panels is installed in the courtyard. I asked the woman who met me how they wound up with the mosaic panels, Meiere having had nothing to do with Harvard, and it was apparently an architect who was friends with Hilly who put them in contact. I wonder if the Doric columns at the entrance made him think these panels would be especially consonant in that environment.

It's installed back-to-back with the second piece, which is inside in a conference room. I was impressed not only by the sheer size (despite the inclusion of a human figure for scale on our preparatory model) but by the colors of the stones used, which is much varied than it appears in the model.

Today was our second-to-last day of seminars. Chris Celenza, dean of humanities and one-time director of AAR, had lunch with us to tell us about Georgetown's efforts to launch a Humanities Institute, and after the afternoon session, a member of the English faculty told us about their new master's program in public humanities and engagement. Between the two was the most boring three-hour "talk" (I use the term advisedly) on museums and the digital. It was rough; I admit to spending a lot of time not-too-subtly on my phone. Turns out my determination to take notes by hand has some drawbacks, in that everyone else could look attentive while checking their emails! Tomorrow--blessedly our last day, but all with this woman--I might bring it with me.

I scoffed a bit at "mandatory fun" at the outset, but now that I've gotten to know everyone it's much more fun. We're planning a champagne blowout for next Wednesday, our penultimate evening together, to honor our directors, Karen and Gretchen, and their fabulous assistant Claire. Jennifer, a exceedingly dry-humored public historian from Kennesaw State, commented that she would miss these social events when everything ends, which is surely a sign of the community that's formed. I do wish I had more time just to think and process, but this weekend should be good for that. I'm going to Baltimore on Friday, but plan to stay indoors on Saturday, when the "feels-like" temperature is likely to hit 112 in DC. A group of us plan to go down to the Mall Saturday night to see the Apollo 11 50th anniversary commemoration at the National Monument, so hopefully it's cooled a bit by then!

More Mall Adventures

Monday was our last off-campus field trip. We went to the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, which primarily hold Asian art. The Freer also has some American art, notably the largest collection of Whistler in the US, including his famed Peacock Room. We were there to meet with artist Darren Waterston, who "remixed" the Peacock Room in 2014, first at Mass MoCA and later at the Freer itself, in an immersive installation called "Filthy Lucre."

Whistler isn't an artist I know well: I think of Arrangement in Grey and Black (The Artist's Mother), mostly for the Billy Collins poem about it, and his nearly-abstract Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), which led to his famous libel suit against the fairly conservative art critic John Ruskin, who had accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public." Whistler won the trial, but was bankrupted by it; additionally, he had just lost the support of his major patron, Frederick Leyland, over the Peacock Affair. Whistler had been invited to contribute some minimal ideas for color scheme and ornament to a room in Leyland's London mansion that housed his collection of blue-and-white porcelain as well as one of Whistler's own paintings. During Leyland's absence from home, Whistler went well beyond his brief and created Harmony in Blue and Gold, covering everything in the room from the baseboards to the shutters to the ceiling with shades of blue, green, and gold. Even the fireplace is tricked out with luscious blue mosaic. It's an extraordinary environment, indeed almost "excessively beautiful," as the former curator of American art at the Freer told us.

Leyland was furious, on his return, not only that Whistler had overstepped, but that he'd been publicizing his work to the press to drum up business for himself. He refused to pay Whistler at all, and later sued to recover what he'd already advanced. Whistler, in turn, insisted he be allowed to complete the room, which he considered his legacy. His final touch was the gold painting of the two fighting male peacocks (which gave the room its name). One of these, its feathers dripping with coin and depicted with a ruffled front, is clearly identifiable as the wealthy Leyland (who apparently favored ruffled shirts), while the other sports a forelock mimicking Whistler's own. Whistler called the scene the "Art and Money, or The Story of the Room," which is about the most meta thing you can possibly imagine! Interestingly, despite the controversy over its creation, Leyland didn't change a thing about the Peacock Room--not even his own caricature--and used it for the rest of his life as his dining room. After his death, the American magnate Charles Freer bought the room for his home in Detroit, and later moved it to D.C. when he donated his collection to the nation.

Darren Waterston said that he found it fascinating how aware Whistler was of the uneven dynamics of power between artist and patron, even those who were on some level friends, and even more fascinating how willing he was to talk about it during the Gilded Age. His installation involved basically making another Peacock Room, using traditional methods and high-quality materials, but it was a Peacock Room deformed and decaying in its own beauty--broken pottery on distorted shelves, creeping stalagmites of gold clinging to surfaces, hellfire glowing from behind the shutters, and the peacocks disemboweling each other:

It took him eighteen months to complete! I wish we could have seen it alongside the original room, but it's currently installed at the V&A in London.

I stuck around during the lunch break to explore the rest of the museum. The Ming/Qing porcelain was extraordinary! My spring "art and technology" survey just grew to incorporate the technique of porcelain, which, while not invented during the 1400-modern period, conveniently assumed its most prized form during that time. The galleries on Buddhist art had really clear, helpful information about Buddhism, the Historical Buddha, and the thirty-two "body marks" of a buddha, including (in addition to straight white teeth, blue eyes, and the torso of a lion) a tuft of hair between the eyebrows and a skull protuberance, features which translate, in depictions of the Buddha, into the dot between his eyebrows and his topknot. If I knew that, from Kathy's Buddhist art seminar, I've long since forgotten. The special exhibition "Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia," was also really cool, especially the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, a fully immersive environment, complete with recorded chanting. 

The Freer is above ground, while the Sackler is several layers underground. It also rather confusingly intersects with the Museum of African Art, where I looked at some Benin bronzes. They will be the "paradigm monument" for a section on bronze casting in my spring course, not least because they will let me bring in the contemporary discourse on repatriation. The Benin bronze, which number in the several hundred, were looted by the British in a punitive raid on the palace of the oba of Benin in 1897. The museum had an interactive with a proposed reconstruction of how the plaques adorned the doors and columns of the palace, which the British burned. The bronzes can be found in museums all over the world, including, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, at the NMAAHC. If I get really enthusiastic, I can assign the Sarr-Savoy report from France, which recommended returning all African objects in French museums to museums on the continent. 

After the museums, I walked down the street to the USDA, which has the one of the few cafeterias in a federal agency that's also open to the public. You get a visitor sticker from security and everything! It's just a regular cafeteria, albeit one with excellent food at low prices. There's one check-out lane reserved for the actual USDA employees, and one for all of us tourists. The walls were covered with historical USDA posters, including a WWI-era poster urging Americans to "save the products of the land" and eat fish instead, since they "feed themselves." Not anymore, really!